On Feb 18, 8:51 am, William Stein <wst...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> At University of Washington, even with a site license, MATLAB costs me
> $100, so I don't have it on my laptop.
> There are limited licenses for students, and I've been told they have
> trouble doing homework assignments, due to
> sharing those licenses.
FUD?
It seems to me that if I were writing useful/important code that
paying
$100 would not be such a bad idea, though I agree that "free" would be
"better". I would have reservations though if the university gave me
a "free" copy but told me that any program that I wrote using it could
never be sold by me to anyone. It would have to be owned by the
university
(as work for hire), sometimes a university policy. Or it would have
to
be given away free (Sage, GPL) policy.
>
> In my experience, installing MATLAB is much more difficult than
> installing Sage.
That may be your personal experience, but I wonder how widely
shared it is? I have only read about installing Sage, so I cannot tell
for sure, but
it seems that installing on Windows is difficult. Many people post
comments about difficulty compiling it, but not everyone compiles it,
I hope.
So maybe it is easy sometimes.
I have not installed my own copy of (Windows) Matlab for years,
but I assume it still requires downloading a matlab_installer.exe
and clicking on it, then perhaps typing the name of the license
server.
Installing software on a properly installed Linux system is even
easier
in the best case (where you have right permissions etc).
> I can imagine no worse hell than being asked to
> install a working MATLAB on a bunch of random Linux, OS X, and Windows
> boxes.
That's probably why system administrators are paid, except
when professors act as their own system administrators.
Even "free"
software can require time and skill to install.
>
> >> > I am not surprised that there is a relatively small overlap between
> >> > scientific
> >> > computing and Python programming. Most scientific computing tasks are
> >> > sensitive
> >> > to efficiency of resulting code.
>
> >> This is just FUD, suggesting that one can't use Python for scientific
> >> computing due to it being too slow.
>
> > Well, the issue is not so much the programming language efficiency,
> > or how much it matters in practice to have some data setup and web
> > access
> > and debugging be written in a friendlier languaage, but a perception.
>
> Thus your FUD is all the more damaging....
Read the article posted by Tim Daly..
>
> >> Most people doing scientific also
> >> use C/Fortran-based libraries such as numpy and scipy, and quite a few
> >> use Cython as well.
>
> > Can't those libraries (or something like them) also be called from C
> > or Fortran?
>
> If those libraries = "numpy/scipy", then absolutely not. Most of the
> code in numpy is new code, which provides a different and powerful
> perspective on n-dimensional data manipulation that isn't provided by
> any underlying library it depends on (BLAS). Some of scipy is just
> wrapping Fortran libraries, and some (quite a bit) is new code not
> wrapping anything.
>
I think the right perspective is shown here. You can use Python to
wrap
what most people consider the scientific computing core systems.
Writing those core systems in Python is not particularly credible.
But wrapping difficult-to-use programs in nicer "higher level" ways
may be a worthy endeavor.
( a somewhat unfair analogy ---
We do not say that the rapid proliferation
of cell phones means they are increasingly being used to write
internet communications software...
That's what I was driving at in my question that you chose to
ignore..
"Oh, that reminds me, what is Lapack written in?
Do you think it would benefit by rewriting in Python or Cython?
What about Scalapack, BLAS, etc. " )
In terms of Jan's comment -- I'm not sure the barrier to entry is
lowest for Python -- There are lots of contenders, and it is not
obvious which is the winner. In some circumstances, I've found
that Visual Basic or JScript (ECMAscript/) are trivial. Python has
other useful attributes though.
Anyway, if we say that people who wrap FORTRAN programs in python are
called
"scientific computing" programmers, maybe we need another name for the
people who write those FORTRAN (or C or whatever) programs.
None of this really affects the validity of the Tiobe data which says
that
Python "Tiobe popularity index" is higher than ever.
RJF
--
To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to
sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URL: http://www.sagemath.org
